For some strange reason, Apple engineers working on yet-to-be-released iPhones have a tendency to lose their prototypes in the Bay Area bars: earlier today, CNET reported that an iPhone 5 prototype was lost by an Apple employee in a bar, about a year after another employee lost an iPhone 4 prototype the exact same way– note that this time around, the bar was the Cava22 Lounge in San Francisco.
The phone was most likely used for field-testing purposes, and once the engineer realized he lost his device, Apple worked doubles shifts to recover it as soon as possible. As it turns out, the device was never recovered.

Apple electronically traced the phone to a two-floor, single-family home in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, according to the source. […] When San Francisco police and Apple’s investigators visited the house, they spoke with a man in his twenties who acknowledged being at Cava 22 on the night the device went missing. But he denied knowing anything about the phone. The man gave police permission to search the house, and they found nothing, the source said.

Unlike last year’s lost iPhone, the person who found the device did not seem to have tried to sell it to a newspaper or a blog– last year’s prototype was eventually purchased by Gizmodo, which in turn got sued by Apple. At this stage, nobody really knows what happened to the prototype, but it could have been sold on Craigslist, or worse, directly to an Apple competitor.
[image courtesy of macrumors]